News:

"There is a terrible desperation to the increasingly pathetic rationalizations from the climate denial camp. This comes as no surprise if you take the long view; every single undone paradigm in history has died kicking and screaming, and our current petroleum paradigm 🐉🦕🦖 is no different. The trick here is trying to figure out how we all make it to the new ⚡ paradigm without dying ☠️ right along with the old one, kicking, screaming or otherwise." - William Rivers Pitt

Posted by: AGelbert

Host John Farrell talks with Marcel Castro Sitiriche, co-director of CoHemis at the University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez, about the challenges Puerto Rico faces in building a clean and resilient energy system. They also discuss:

✔ The impact of hurricane Maria and why it took nearly a year to restore power to some residents of the island after the storm.

✔ Using the framework of customer hours of lost electricity service to calculate the impact of hurricane Maria and compare it to other storms.

✔ How solar and storage can be instrumental in making Puerto Rico’s energy system more resilient.

✔ The impact of Puerto Rico’s colonial past on its present effort to build an energy system for everyone.

✔ Clean energy legislation in Puerto Rico and near term opportunities to create a more distributed energy system.

Posted by: AGelbert

To have a little fun and to have something to check on later to see how crazy I am, I decided to come up with a forecast on some major Tesla milestones. I have a feeling this is not a smart thing to do, but I’m going to do it anyway. Here’s my wild ass guess at how it’s gonna go down with Tesla:

• In 2018, Tesla Model 3 becomes one of the 5 best selling cars in the USA in the second half of the year and the 11th best selling car for the full year. (Easy one.)

Agelbert COMMENT: 👍🍀I would add a slight modification to the events of 2021😀.

► In 2021, Tesla Model Y is one of the 10 THE best selling vehicle in the USA due to the Electric Vehicle for Internal Combustion Engine Polluting Clunker Legislation passed by the Democratic Party controlled Senate and House of Representatives.

One month after being inaugurated, President Sanders signed this portion of extensive Green New Deal Legislation working its way through Congress to get the USA off of biosphere degrading hydrocarbon fuels.

A consortium of you know who (i.e. 🐉🦕🦖) corporations hired former Attorney General Barr 😈 to challenge this Legislation on the basis that it undermined National Security (i.e. 🐉🦕🦖) and was Super UnConstitutional. Barr stated that, "This energy sector (i.e. 🐉🦕🦖) and economy (i.e.💵🎩👹🍌) destroying Socialist/Communist evil gross attack on the freedom of all red blooded Americans (i.e.💵🐉🦕🦖🎩) will be overturned by the Supreme Court".

► December 2021: Four Supreme Court Justices, all of whom were named by Republican Presidents, abruptly resigned within days of President Sanders signing into Law the recent Legislation authorizing a new total of 15 Justices for the Supreme Court.

► December 25, 2021 🎄: According to Vice President Elizabeth Warren, the names of some of those being considered for the Supreme Court are Jay Inslee, Bill McKibben, Jill Stein and James Hansen.

Largest Tesla Battery Storage Installation In Asia For Japanese Railway

Tesla has completed its largest battery storage installation in Asia in Osaka, Japan. The 4.2 MW / 7 MWh facility uses 42 Tesla Powerpack battery storage units, which were installed in just 2 days following their arrival onsite.

Many of those tracks pass through tunnels which can hamper rescue efforts if there is a power outage. The Tesla batteries can provide enough electricity for stranded trains to operate for up to 30 minutes — enough for them to exit those tunnels and perhaps reach the nearest station, according to ArsTechnica.

The batteries may also help the railway to save money by storing energy when it is plentiful and providing it back to the system during times of peak demand when prices are higher. The system is expected to be activated on April 1.

During the recent Model Y reveal, Elon Musk told his audience, “This is the year of the solar roof and Powerwall. Batteries were at a premium in 2018 because all resources had to be reallocated to Model 3 production — otherwise, we were going to die,” he said. “But now that Model 3 production is going well, we’re excited about the solar roof, solar retrofit, and Powerwall.”

According to Greentech Media, Tesla deployed a total of 1.04 gigawatt-hours of energy storage in 2018, triple the amount installed in 2017. In its year-end 2018 letter to investors, Tesla claimed “a better supply of cells and new manufacturing equipment” will allow it to install “over 2 gigawatt-hours in 2019.” Best of all, the profitability of its energy storage business is increasing as well. “It’s clear that there is a huge opportunity for us in large-scale energy storage,” Musk said recently.

While conservatives reactionaries 🦕🦖 continue bleating about how expensive battery storage is, the truth is that costs are plummeting. Most of those naysayers are paid agents of the natural gas 🦕 industry, which is quaking in its boots as it realizes it is on the verge of becoming irrelevant.

A report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance dated March 27 says, “the benchmark levelized cost of electricity for lithium-ion batteries has fallen 35% to $187 per megawatt-hour since the first half of 2018.” BNEF analyst Elena Giannakopoulou adds this insight: “Looking back over this decade, there have been staggering improvements in the cost-competitiveness of these low-carbon options, thanks to technology innovation, economies of scale, stiff price competition and manufacturing experience.”

Last year, Elon Musk told investors Tesla is capable of building batteries at the cell level for $100 per kilowatt hour and will soon be able to build battery packs at the $100 per kilowatt-hour level as well. “The rate of stationary storage is going to grow exponentially. For many years to come, each incremental year will be about as much as all of the preceding years,” he said.

Just as it is driving structural changes in auto manufacturing, Tesla is also pushing mainstream actors in the electrical generation and distribution field to change their perceptions away from a “business as usual” mindset to one that incorporates more low and zero emissions solutions. Flowery speeches don’t affect change in the world of commerce but low prices certainly do.

Posted by: AGelbert

If we redirected the trillions spent on fruitless wars, funding Medicare for All and a Green New Deal is perfectly realistic.

The Sunrise Movement organized a protest to pressure Senator Mitch McConnell to support the Green New Deal on 25 February in Washington DC.

At long last the political debate in the world’s richest country is vibrant with proposals that would help the most vulnerable in our society. And what do we hear in response? A growing chorus of naysayers.

“Just pipe dreams” – that’s how the Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson referred to proposals for guaranteed jobs, Medicare for All, universal childcare, and the Green New Deal.

Like many other pundits and politicians, Samuelson says we can’t afford such luxuries. Taxing the rich wouldn’t raise enough money. We’d have no choice but to resort to deficit spending.

Funny how some politicians have no qualms about ballooning the deficit with tax cuts for the rich but balk at investing in the long-term health of our people and communities. Just as peculiar: the fact that military spending cuts are virtually never mentioned as an option for freeing up funds for social good instead of war.

This year the US military budget is $716bn – and boy is it ripe for slashing.

That military budget represents about 53 cents of every discretionary dollar in the federal budget  and it’s one of the biggest reasons that people so often throw up their hands and shake their heads when they think about funding innovative ways to end poverty.

They don’t need to throw up their hands, though. The politicians and pundits should just start listening to children.

When young organizers from the Sunrise Movement recently challenged Senator Dianne Feinstein to support a Green New Deal, she told them “there’s no money to pay for it”. She probably didn’t expect those eight- and 10- and 11-year-old kids to respond immediately: “Yes, there is, there’s tons of money going to the military.”

Feinstein responded condescendingly that the military does “important things” with that money. Our never-ending wars say otherwise.

Last year saw the highest number of civilians killed in the Afghanistan war since the UN began keeping track – more than 3,800 people, 930 of them children. About a quarter of them were killed by US and Nato troops and their Afghan government allies – and most of those by US-Nato airstrikes and drone attacks. Thousands more were injured.

Committing such mayhem doesn’t come cheap. Last year alone, the war in Afghanistan, in its 17th year, cost about $45bn. And that’s just the immediate cost of fighting the war – it doesn’t include the costs of caring for injured US soldiers, let alone Afghan victims. It doesn’t include training more soldiers to replace the ones occupying Afghanistan now, or the enormous sums spent on the base Pentagon budget.

Most importantly, the war in Afghanistan hasn’t made us any safer, and isn’t making life better for the people of Afghanistan. (To take one grim measure, at the start of the war, Afghan babies faced the fourth-highest levels of infant mortality of any children in the world. Today, after almost 18 years of US war, Afghanistan is No 1.)

And those soldiers that have come back from the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond? They still aren’t getting the care they need. They still struggle to access Veterans Administration clinics and hospitals, and they’re still killing themselves at rates advocates deem a “national emergency”. According to the VA itself, the Guardian reports, veterans aged 18-34, many of whom served in Iraq and Afghanistan, have “higher rates of suicide than any other age group”.

The human toll of these wars is staggering. And the financial costs are breathtaking. Neta Crawford, who co-directs the Cost of Wars Project at Brown University, estimated back in 2017 that total war spending in just Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan was approaching $5tn since 2001.

When we’re talking about trillions of dollars – $2tn for Afghanistan and another $3tn or so for Iraq and beyond, Crawford calculates – it means there’s plenty of money to fund things that really do keep our people and our country safe.

For just a quarter of that $2tn we’ve spent on a fruitless, brutal war in Afghanistan, the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies calculates we could instead fund more than 103,000 elementary school teachers, 112,000 clean energy jobs, 935,000 Head Start slots, and healthcare for 806,000 veterans and more than 2.3 million adults, and retrofit nearly 5.8m houses for solar electricity.

In fact, we could do all of that every year for 10 years.

Compared to all this, paying trillions for war isn’t an investment – it’s just a loss. It’s loss at a scale that, if it were reversed, would make a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and all the rest perfectly realistic.

CleanTechnicaSupport CleanTechnica’s work via donations on Patreon or PayPal!

March 9th, 2019 by Mark Z. Jacobson

Why The Green New Deal CutsConsumerEnergy Costs & Unemployment

SNIPPET 1:

Quote

Critics🐉🦕🦖😈 claim, though, that the Green New Deal is unaffordable and uneconomical and will sink the US into more debt. Having led the research team that developed science-based plans to transition each of the 50 states to 100% wind, water, and solar (WWS) in all energy sectors (electricity, transportation, heating and cooling, and industry), we conclude the opposite is true: the benefits of clean energy systems greatly exceed the costs. 10 other independent research groups similarly find that 100% renewable energy systems are low costwithoutfossil fuels with carbon capture or nuclear power.

SNIPPET 2:

Quote

Thus, thecritics 🐉🦕🦖😈 of the GND thus have it backwards: not transitioningto a clean energy system is unaffordable and uneconomical.

The Fossil Fuelers 🦖 DID THE Clean Energy Inventionssuppressing, Climate Trashing, human healthdepleting CRIME, but since they have ALWAYS BEEN liars and conscience free crooks 🦀, they are trying to AVOID DOING THE TIME or PAYING THE FINE! Don't let them get away with it! Pass it on!

Posted by: AGelbert

In a recent column, Truthdig’s Ellen Brown explains why Ocasio-Cortez’s plan to fund the ambitious deal isn’t pie in the sky, but rather a sound economic proposal with plenty of historical data behind it:

Posted by: AGelbert

Portland General Electric is working with NextEra Energy Resources to develop a 380-megawatt project in Oregon which will be the first of its kind to integrate wind, solar and energy storage. ✨

PGE says the project will allow the utility to produce half of its power from renewable sources and “serve as a model for integrating renewables with storage, while cost-effectively reducing emissions and maintaining a reliable grid.” The project will in part replace generation from PGE’s Boardman Coal Plant, which will retire in 2020. 😀 Oregon’s renewable portfolio standard requires half of the state’s power to come from renewables by 2040.

Posted by: AGelbert

Posted by: AGelbert

Renewables surpassed coal as Germany’s largest source of electricity production last year, accounting for over 40 percent of the mix.

This is up from about 38 percent in 2017 and 19 percent in 2010. Fraunhofer, the organization behind the data, expects that renewable energy output will remain above 40 percent in 2019 due to increased installation and weather patterns.

The country is aiming to have 65 percent of its energy come from renewable sources by 2030.

Posted by: AGelbert

Agelbert"We need more politicians to step up to the crisis of climate change, as has Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Life as we know it on earth depends on it."

freedomev > agelbert

So true and even the majority of repubs.

It is only the repub leaders in Congress and President whom keep the FF corporate welfare, $600B/yr in the US .

Now add these subsidies to the cost of FFs and not using them saves us about $1.2T/yr!!

So just how does not paying $1.2T/yr cost more than RE not paying it?

Fact is on just 5 yrs of FF costs, we could get of FFs.

And then pay 50%-20% for RE once switched.

What is needed is clear signals from the government by making those whom use FFs pay their full costs instead of foisting it on the taxpayers.

And use that money to do the switch which can be as simple as tax and dividend going to the lower 80% of income. One can do a PPA and sell it to poor people at a discount or free covering their cost for 20+ yrs for $3k.

Lightweight EVs can be made quickly and greatly increase employment locally by building, selling and maintaining them locally. Especially ones you can bring or drive inside. These can be under $1k with 50+ mile range and cost little for 20 yrs.

Insulation CHP, etc to lower their energy use.

A studio can be built for only $20k supplying them with shelter, energy, water, septic built in plus lightweight transport plus the land for 20 yrs.

Fact is it is the lowest cost way as I know, it is how I live well on minimal SS with all monthly costs under $200 including food, transport.

Thus leaving me $550/month to live with plus income from various deals that become available allows me to slowly build my all composite 63 Vette coupe looking EV.

So it really isn't hard to live FF free. In fact living with FFs is what costs more not even including GHG effects.

agelbert > freedomev

Freedomev ✨, You are 100% RIGHT! 👍🌞

💐 Thank you for your wisdom and your admirable life style. If your advice was followed by our governments (local, state and national), we would have transitioned to 100% Clean Energy by this time.

The Fossil Fuelers 🦖 DID THE Clean Energy Inventionssuppressing, Climate Trashing, human healthdepleting CRIME, but since they have ALWAYS BEEN liars and conscience free crooks 🦀, they are trying to AVOID DOING THE TIME or PAYING THE FINE! Don't let them get away with it! Pass it on!

Posted by: AGelbert

As the Green New Deal pioneered by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez continues to gain momentum, the plan to wean the U.S. off of fossil fuels has now found support in more than 300 local and state government officials who called for the initiative in an open letter on Friday.

Full article:

Hundreds of Local and State Officials Just Endorsed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal 👍👍👍

Posted by: AGelbert

Renewable power generation in Germany is headed for a record this year, according to utility E.ON. “By year-end, we expect more than 200 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of renewable generation and feed-in – about five billion more than in 2017, and more than ever before,” said Victoria Ossadnik, head of E.ON Energie Germany. E.ON said this amount of renewable power could cover the annual consumption of 66 million households, equivalent to all households in Germany and Italy combined.

The company said, according to its calculations, the 2018 renewable generation to date will top the entire 2017 output sometime this week.

Posted by: AGelbert

Clean energy jobs in the rural Midwest outnumberthose in fossil fuels in ten out of 12 states

According to a report by the Natural Resources Defense Council, clean energy employed roughly 158,000 people in 2017, with the majority of those jobs found in energy efficiency. In that year, 31 gigawatts of wind and solar were added in the Midwest.

While a larger amount of these clean energy jobs were located in urban areas, they accounted for a larger proportion of rural jobs.

President Emmanuel Macron of France depressed nuclear executives globally in late November 2018, announcing the planned retirement of 14 of 58 reactors by 2035. This was still less than was promised in his election campaign, but represents a major internal political battle, as well as a major change of France’s circumstances.

France did a better job than most of building nuclear plants. They picked a single design and built a bunch of them over a relatively concentrated 20 years from about 1978 onward. It was a massive, state-funded, state-managed energy infrastructure initiative at a scale rarely seen. They dodged a bunch of the mistakes of other geographies somewhat by accident. They aren’t subject to earthquakes or tsunamis. They kept the technology highly standard. They developed a skilled workforce for building them and rewarded them well.

But the last nuclear reactor went live almost 20 years ago, the oldest ones are at end-of-life, and the skilled workforce only knows how to maintain and operate existing reactors now, not build new ones. The current President of France, Macron, used to be the Minister of Industry. He’s stated publicly that even he couldn’t find out how much the build-out actually cost, with the clear assertion that a bunch of actual costs were hidden.

Quote

“Nobody knows the total cost for nuclear energy,” he said. “I was minister for industry and I could not tell you.”

And France had to build nuclear to be load-following due to its over-reliance on a more usually inflexible form of generation. Nuclear is good for baseload up to 30–40%, but when it has to be turned on and off it gets a lot more expensive very quickly.France has the good fortune to have been able to export a lot of electricity to the rest of the EU for several years, but the energy mix on the continent is strongly favoring more flexible forms of generation.

And now, a few things have changed in the decades since France made its huge bet on nuclear generation in the Messmer Plan in 1974.

Renewables are dirt cheap, with Lazard’s latest figures bringing them in at 3–6 times cheaper than new nuclear. (Amusingly, Lazard still labels wind and solar as ‘alternative energy‘. )Europe is a leading geography for wind and solar, so skilled trades and supply chains all exist. Europe’s grid has strengthened and expanded over the past 30 years, so the need for a country to go it alone has diminished substantially.

The EU was founded in 1993 and France is an integral part of it, and that has two impacts. The first is that France’s energy independence policy that was part of the impetus for a massive nuclear fleet looks archaic in context of modern politics and economics. The second is that EU regulations forbid destabilizingly large governmental subsidies for energy, something which the Hinkley plant in the EU had to fight through. As Macron’s experience shows, it’s actually impossible for anyone to figure out how much any nuclear plant actually cost due to budget fudging. This last is true globally, by the way.

French attempts to build next-generation reactorsare failing in multiple locations in France and elsewhere. The cost and budget overruns and construction failures are staggering.

And Chernobyl and Fukushima both happened since the French nuclear build-out began. Public support diminished substantially after those events, one on the same continent and one a world away.

France receives a greater percentage of its electricity from nuclear than any country in the world, at 72% close to 50% more than its nearest ‘competitor’, Slovakia. And it will diminish over the coming decades. Its last-built reactor will reach end-of-life in 2040 or so. It’s unlikely that it will be replaced. And it’s unlikely that more than a fraction of the aging reactors will be refurbished at all.

Wind, solar, a continent-scale grid, and open economic borders all contributed to the death of the Frenchnucleardream.

It’s time for France to wake up and join the future, and it has. It voted in Macron, a politician who promised to reduce France’s nuclear fleet. He fought the entrenched bureaucracy and EDF, and while the new plans are slower than the promised ones, they are the right plans on a pragmatic timeline.

Let us not forget WHO PROFITED from these radioactive white elephants when the bill for decommissioning them comes due. Yes folks, that bill will be massive.

The logical thing to do is find every single person in every corporation that profited directly from building and maintaining these nuclear reactors and TAX THEM appropriately for the cost of decommissioning said nuclear reactors.

Yes, I know, ALL the French public will be billed for this while those who profited from the polluting energy will pay a pittance. That's how things "work" in CAPITALISM. 👎👎👎 😡🤬

A new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance has highlighted the rising importance of developing nations in driving clean energy adoption worldwide, and finds they are seizing the mantle of global clean energy leadership from wealthier, more developed nations.

A combination of surging electricity demand, declining technology costs, and a surge in innovative policy-making have resulted in developing nations stepping up to seize the mantle of global clean energy leadership from wealthier nations, according to a comprehensive new report published by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) as part of its annual Climatescope project.

According to the report, emerging market nations surveyed by Climatescope accounted for the majorities of clean energy capacity added, and new funds deployed, globally in 2017. Specifically, developing nations added an impressive total of 114 gigawatts (GW) worth of zero-carbon generating capacity — including 94 GW worth of wind and solar. At the same time, developing nations brought online the least amount of new coal-fired power generating capacity since at least 2006 — with new build coal falling 38% year-over-year to 48 GW, half of what was added in 2015.

“It’s been quite a turnaround,” said Dario Traum, BNEF senior associate and Climatescope project manager. “Just a few years ago, some argued that less developed nations could not, or even should not, expand power generation with zero-carbon sources because these were too expensive. Today, these countries are leading the charge when it comes to deployment, investment, policy innovation and cost reductions.”

In addition to the increasing economic viability of clean energy technologies — specifically technologies such as wind and solar — which are further bolstered by the “exceptional” natural resources boasted by many developing nations, when combined with continually declining technology equipment costs, new renewable energy projects in developing nations are regularly outcompeting new fossil fuel projects on price. This has been most evident in the 28+ GW worth of generation contracted through tenders in emerging markets in 2017.

Financing for renewable energy projects in developing nations is similarly increasing, with 54 developing nations recording investment in at least one utility-scale wind farm, and 76 countries receiving financing for solar projects of 1.5 megawatts (MW) or larger (up from 20 and 3, respectively, a year ago). Further, development banks, export credit agencies, and other traditional backers are all combining to ensure investment and project backing continues to support the development of clean technology projects in emerging nations.

“European players, in particular, have moved aggressively to finance projects, particularly in Latin America,” said BNEF head of Americas Ethan Zindler, who helped found Climatescope. “While concessional capital is still clearly required in least developed countries or in others just beginning to adopt clean energy, elsewhere private funders appear quite comfortable deploying capital at volume.”

The report further highlights the growing trend that shows developing nations are skipping the fossil fuel stage of economic development which has so plagued their more developed brethren.

“I think it’s undeniable that for an equivalent level of economic development (GDP/capita), a number of emerging markets have a much higher penetration of solar and wind than their most developed peers had,” explained Dario Traum, who spoke to me via email.

“That’s a factor of technology change but also of course of cost. Emerging markets are where renewables most frequently undercut existing power procurement cost. In particular, Latin America has a number of countries that are amongst the countries with the highest level of solar + wind penetration, often facilitated by hydro and interconnection with neighbours.

“Caveat to all that is that big manufacturing and demographic hubs in Asia haven’t yet been able to get around coal as a cheap way to power industry around the clock. But they are seeing the consequences too, in particular air pollution. So a strong support for renewables there to.”